The phenomenally stupid idea of attacking the Houthis is getting more support:
Saudi Arabia is among a number of Middle Eastern countries telling the West they back strikes against the Houthis in Yemen whose attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have diminished commercial traffic in the vital waterway.
If this report is true, this is just evidence that the Saudi government is back to its old reckless tricks. One might have thought that almost nine years of failed intervention in Yemen would have been enough to sour Riyadh on more military action there, but it seems that the crown prince and his advisers refuse to learn anything. U.S. attacks on Yemen will be dangerous not only for American interests, but they will also backfire on other U.S. clients in the region, especially if they are seen as supporting the attacks.
The Times article includes this bit of absurd spin:
Any action against the rebels in Yemen would coincide with attempts by the United States to prevent the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas spreading to the rest of the region.
If the U.S. takes military action against the Houthis in response to their attacks on commercial vessels, it will be among those spreading the war to the rest of the region. Military action against Yemen won’t “coincide” with attempts to prevent the war from spreading. It will cancel out those attempts and render them irrelevant. Attacking the Houthis would be a dramatic escalation in response to what should be a manageable problem. It will not solve the problem, it will further destabilize the region, and it could very well spark a larger conflict that extends beyond Yemen and its immediate vicinity.
Striking directly at the Houthis isn’t the only terrible idea on Yemen policy that hawks are pushing these days. Kenneth Pollack and Katherine Zimmerman took to the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal to urge the U.S. to throw military support behind the ramshackle Yemeni government. In addition to engaging in some insane revisionism that “Washington recoiled when the Saudis and Emiratis intervened in Yemen” (there was almost no opposition from any quarter and there was broad bipartisan support in D.C. for the intervention when it started), they insist that the U.S. has to back the same illegitimate, unrepresentative government that has struggled to regain power for almost a decade.
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.